Public Notice of Development Applications in Ontario
Municipal planning information may be public, but that does not always make it easy to find, monitor, or understand.
Across Ontario, municipalities regularly publish notices about development applications, zoning by-law amendments, Official Plan changes, heritage matters, public meetings, approvals, and other regulatory activity.
Some notices appear on municipal websites. Others are posted through planning application portals, council agendas, public meeting pages, newsrooms, or signs placed directly on affected properties. Depending on the application and applicable notice requirements, nearby property owners may also receive notice by mail.
The information is technically available to the public.
The problem is that it is often scattered across multiple locations, and professionals still need to know where, when, and how to look for it.
For a lawyer, planner, developer, architect, broker, contractor, property owner, or real estate professional, that fragmentation creates a meaningful risk: an important municipal change may be discovered only after it begins affecting a transaction, development proposal, approval strategy, or property review.
That is the problem AEDI's Regulatory Intelligence layer was designed to address.
Public Information Is Not Always Accessible Information
Municipal planning information is published for an important reason. Public notice allows residents, property owners, professionals, and other interested parties to understand what is being proposed and participate in the planning process.
But making information publicly available does not automatically make it easy to monitor.
A professional may need to review:
- Municipal planning and development pages
- Public notices
- Council and committee agendas
- Planning application portals
- Zoning by-law update pages
- Official Plan review materials
- Heritage notices
- Public meeting announcements
- Notices of decision or approval
Each municipality may organize and publish this information differently.
A development professional working across several municipalities may therefore need to monitor several different websites, page structures, document formats, and publication schedules.
That is a significant amount of effort before the information can even be assessed.
Regulatory Intelligence Inside AEDI
A feature of AEDI that we have had from the start, and I want to bring attention to publicly, is the Regulatory Intelligence pane inside of the application. And that is a home of these development application publications, as well as monitoring municipal releases for development applications.
And the reason I want to bring this up is there was a substantial item that I logged onto and saw the other day. And this is why we developed this.
In the City of Waterloo, I logged in to see on my dashboard that the City of Waterloo had a general amendment to the zoning by-law in July of 2026. And I was immediately taken, I can click and be taken, to the posting for the general amendments to the zoning by-law, 2018-05.
That affects the Waterloo zoning by-law. This is a massive piece of information, and this happens all the time.
The City of Guelph, for instance, had Official Plan Amendment 110 (OPA 110) that was released and impacts all applications moving forward. And a zoning by-law amendment also would impact applications moving forward.
So, this is really key information, and most professionals would be monitoring this type of thing.
And it is a part of the review process for an application, as I said from the outset. But what AEDI has done, what we've done, is created in your dashboard a daily monitoring system. You can set your municipalities as you work in, or the ones that are most important to you.
You can have them all visible, or you can filter to your specific municipality.
This is the type of tool that makes you aware of the amount of time it takes to regulate or review this information, and where you need to go to find it. And then provides links for all the steps that are required.
This is all housed in one place.
This is just one of the many ways that AEDI has streamlined and is simplifying or cleaning the process and making sure it's more hands-length or easy to access throughout the process.
See How AEDI Is Making the Process Better Every Day
